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The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

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Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#361

Post by mongodude »

jordanthoms wrote: post #164

This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the ear…

I agree with you 100% and if you analyze the comments on HN everytime Google decides to mess around with their IM, I have seen similar sentiment around Gtalk. I was a regular user of Gtalk during college days 10 years ago and was pissed when they merge/transition them into hangouts. It is a poor product management decision driven by Google's philosophy of capitalizing the next big trend in the internet industry ignoring the preferences of their users.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#363

Post by arwineap »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #282
arwineap wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project fi actually DEPENDS on hangouts. At some point in the last year, I wanted to jump into the "new chat ecosystem" and so I uninstalled hangouts to break bad habits. The entire phone becomes unable to connect to any network. I love hangouts, and I wish RCS could just roll into it; but how did project fi end up so integrated?

> Project fi actually DEPENDS on hangouts. No, it doesn't. In the beginning they strongly suggested that you use Hangouts for SMS on Fi, but they don't require it. I just use Messages on Fi.

Have you uninstalled hangouts, or are you just not using it?

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#364

Post by jdofaz »

Hangouts once upon a time was an effective iMessage alternative and Google totally squandered what they had.

Several years back the Android version of hangouts:

* could message over hangouts, google voice and sms/mms

* could merge those methods into a thread by person

* was a required vendor pre-install app, if you knew someone’s gmail address and they had android you could reliably send a hangouts message

* it was easy to video call people because most people had hangouts installed

Sure it wasn’t as user friendly as iMessage and FaceTime but the base was there and the ui could have improved to get there.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#365

Post by stephenhuey »

danmaz74 wrote: post #355
ewjordan wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PM is a super heavily overloaded term that you'll run across in pretty much any company larger than small, definitely not specific to Google (disclaimer: I work at Google and don't speak for the company, but I'm brand new so my conception of the categories comes from what I've seen elsewhere). Engineers tend to raise an eyebrow at the entire job category because they're thinking of bad experiences with one particular…

> You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats You certainly don't need a certified scrum master. Ideally, the scrum master should be somebody who is already in the team. A scrum master who does just that is really a project manager, and having a project manager is, IMHO, antithetical to doing scrum.

According to scrum, the scrum master is not the product owner and not a member of the dev team, but rather an objective person who does just the scrum master duties, e.g. facilitating when needed, e.g. making sure people are following scrum instead of getting distracted, not stalled by roadblocks, not taking marching orders from more than one product owner, etc. In scrum, the dev team organizes its time after priorities are set. Scrum does not want a scrum master to be a project manager - if you’ve seen that they’re just mixing unnecessary stuff into scrum and scrum is getting a bad rap for that. I don’t see a scrum master as being a full-time job unless they’re working with multiple teams, so it could easily be anyone knowledgeable outside the team who will objectively play the role.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#366

Post by 0xb100db1ade »

dkhenry wrote: post #32

What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete…

What I love about Signal is their philosophy of "if it's not user friendly, nobody will use it, therefore it won't help anybody."

It's kind of like how Apple will combine security updates with stuff like new emojis: to increase the incentive for the general populus to update.

I sometimes compare Signal to iMessage, except it's cross-platform and private.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#367

Post by NSAID »

pmlnr wrote: post #294
pavanagrawal123 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try https://preview.web.skype.com/ It is the universal Skype written in React (works natively on windows and electroned on other Desktop OSes)

> Browser not supported > Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience. > Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer. That is on up to date Firefox on Debian unstable. Bravo.

Same result on current Firefox with Windows 10

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#368

Post by erentz »

lowercased wrote: post #343
Waterluvian wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy". I once worked at a startup that made the mistake of hiring an entire remote product team from silicon valley. All they did in the year before they mass resigned was inject drama and politics into everything and force…

> This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy". Interesting, because it seems (from the outside) like that was what Microsoft was like internally for years. Blogs like mini-ms seemed to confirm some of that, but of course that was "just one side" of the story.

That was Microsoft before its transition over the past few years. Essentially every single product it’s own vertical with nothing shared, this went right down to having separate switches and server racks managed by separate people.

It’s quite an amazing transformation Microsoft has gone through, never complete of course, but still impressive.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#370

Post by blhack »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #329
unixhero wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great behind the scenes view. What is Social? Is that at major product vertical within Google? "Possibly" is a potential good answer here :).

G+. The slogan at the time was "one unified Google" -- to I think rightfully correct a mistake that Google had a very diverse set of products many of which did not properly interact. As I understand it, GChat wasn't seen seen as able to integrate well into G+. So Hangouts was built on the G+/social infrastructure. To that team's credit they did somewhat seamlessly move users over from GChat to Hangouts without many h…

There must be a name for a concept that seems like it would be obviously true, but actually isn't.

I don't think it's a bad thing that google ha a diverse set of products that didn't work together. I don't need my google calc/excel to integrate with youtube, and I don't need google play music to integrate with gmail.

Google should look at these things as individual companies, which it seems like is something that they finally somewhat figured out with the alphabet rebrand. Just let gmail be a successful company on its own, and let youtube be a successful company on its own. From my perspective as a user, things actually get worse when all of these things try to play together.

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